Public
Authoring in the Wireless City
Urban Tapestries is a Proboscis project exploring social and cultural
uses of the convergence of place and mobile technologies through transdisciplinary
research. To help us model emerging social and cultural behaviours we
have built an experimental platform that allows people to author and access
place-based content (text, audio and pictures). It is a framework
for exploring and sharing experience and knowledge, for leaving and annotating
ephemeral traces of peoples’ presence in the geography of the city.

The Urban
Tapestries software platform allows people to author their own virtual
annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory
to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge
in the new wireless landscape of the city. People can add new locations,
location content and the ‘threads’ which link individual locations
to local contexts, which are accessed via handheld devices such as PDAs
and mobile phones.

Urban Tapestries
seeks to understand why people would use emerging pervasive technologies,
what they could do with them and how we can make this
possible. It seeks to enable people as their own authors and agents, not
merely as consumers of content provided to them by telecoms and media
corporations. The project centres on a fundamental human desire to ‘map’
and 'mark’ territory as part of belonging and of feeling a sense
of ownership of our environment.

Twoanimations have been developed to walk through
some sample scenarios of use: 1
& 2.

Proboscis
has run two trials of our prototypes: a 4 week field
trial of the mobile phone prototype across central London (June 2004);
and a public trial of the initial
prototype in the Bloomsbury district of London (December 2003). Participant
feedback, evaluation and a discussion forum can all be found on the project
weblog.

In October
2004 we released RSS
Feeds for the system allowing people to subscribe to content created
by individual authors, threads, as well as to create their own custom
feed within a radius (100m, 500m, 1km or 5km) or a geographic place of
their choosing (within the area covered by our trials). Proboscis has
also released a Flash
Web Browser (requires registration)
providing a graphical interface to the system.*Take part in our discussion forum on public authoring here.